


Those Who Favor Fire

by Septembers_coda



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brotherly Love, Dean Smokes, Gen, Priest Dean, Priests, Religious Conflict, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Season/Series 13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2019-02-08 01:16:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12853578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Septembers_coda/pseuds/Septembers_coda
Summary: The birth of Lucifer’s son created more than one crack in reality. When Mary and Lucifer were cast into one alternate dimension, Sam was cast into another, and Dean has to do the last thing he ever expected to bring his brother out of the fire one more time.





	Those Who Favor Fire

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Reverse Big Bang 2017 art masterpost](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/342207) by amberdreams. 



> Many, many thanks to the incredibly talented amberdreams whose amazing art inspired this work for this year’s Reverse Big Bang on LiveJournal! You have _got_ to check out this stunning art. Here is the art masterpost:  
>  https://amberdreams.livejournal.com/533280.html

Sam had fallen through a crack. Falling seemed to last a long time. 

Time passed differently here. Sam remembered, but not always. He was present and acted, but only sometimes. So many of his loved ones had died, but that was in the other place, before. So many faces here that he loved, but who did not love him, or know him. He was alone and unknown, strange in a very strange land.

The world collapsed, stretched, inverted and changed wholly. One moment in time, one birth and a few deaths, always those, and everything was different.

Lucifer, and his mother, his mother who wasn’t and shouldn’t be but whom he loved, and a baby who definitely shouldn’t be, and Dean and Cas and Crowley—they were all someplace else.

This, Sam said to himself so many times, was not hell.

It was hard to hold onto himself. Lucifer’s child and the rift created by his birth was two rifts—or many, Sam wasn’t sure, but when he and Dean lost Mary, Sam had lost Dean and his world.

Dean never talked much about purgatory, and Sam tried hard not to remember hell, but he felt that this place was both and neither, and it was Earth and not. He’d gone through the looking glass, or the wardrobe door, or something. 

He woke battered (and he did not know how he could be battered, incorporeally) on the boards of an old church that he knew, in his bones. He had been here, dying, before. He should have died here, would not have gone through this gate if he had closed the other gates, but he was alive. Or had been. He had seen the angels fall, near the place where he’d been born. The fields were like the fields of home, but he was farther from home than he had ever been.

He did not exist in this place. He was a ghost, yet he was not dead, because he had never been born. He could not act, could barely think, for he was like an oak tree, or like Tolkien’s elves—the passage of time seemed not to touch him, a swift fish in slow ice, moving, moving nowhere. He did not know what years meant, and he tried to learn. How many seemed important. It would be important to Dean, when he saw him again.

Sometimes his old mind touched the new place. _Hello, Sam. I miss your strong, quick mind. I miss being you, and where are you? and where is Dean?_

_He’s looking for you._

He looked, too. He could feel the pull, the call, and he prayed. _Please, God. Let me be found. Let me go home._

His prayer was answered.

* * *

Sam stumbled, coughed, covered his eyes and lurched through the murk, his lungs seeking fresher air, his heart seeking his brother. Oddly, as the heat and the terror of flame rose around him, his fear receded. Would he really be here, waiting? He always had been, Sam’s whole life, beginning the first time they’d emerged out of fire together.

The scent of burning grass and scorched earth filled Sam’s awakening senses. Sparks landed on his clothes and stung him like wasps, but he kept moving, toward light, toward home.

“There you are,” said a voice, at last.

* * *

Sam came back to himself, the self he used to be, slowly. Dean’s arm guided him, strong and firm as ever, but Sam? Sam stumbled, felt an ache creep through his bones, coughed and coughed like he would never stop, until the flames were a glow behind and the wind was fresh in his face, then he blinked and opened his eyes.

He wept at what he saw. The world. He had not remembered that it was so beautiful. Colors: yellow, green, blue, brown and soft grey, earth and sky, grass and clouds and behind him, away from him now, smoke and orange-white flame.

“You got old,” said Dean.

“You didn’t,” Sam answered. He coughed again, uncontrollably. Dean patted his back and opened the back door of the Impala, which they’d reached. It curved up from the ground and down from the sky toward Sam like an old friend, and there were such things as friends. 

Dean handed Sam a beer from another old friend, there as always: the green Coleman cooler. Sam stared at it. These things had existed, and still did, earth and sky and Dean and the green cooler. The Impala. His old life and home. He touched it, ran a hand over the side mirror down to the hood: cool metal and the dust from road fumes, more things he remembered.

“I’m home,” he said softly.

“Is it all you remembered?” Dean asked, like he could read Sam’s mind. Maybe he always could, but Sam thought he remembered reading Dean’s, and he couldn’t now. He had no idea what his brother was thinking. 

Dean pulled a pack of cigarettes from the back of the visor and tapped one out. He lit up, leaning against the car. Sam sat down on the hood.

“More,” Sam answered.

Dean smoked in silence for a moment. He drew a Bible out of a pocket in his… priest’s vestments? Sam blinked, and stared.

“How long was it for you?” Dean asked.

“I can’t be sure. At least thirteen years. How about for you?”

“Just over four. You left in August. It’s September now.”

They were quiet for a minute as the flames grew louder behind them. Sam frowned as something started prickling the back of his brain—something not as it should be.

“You _smoke_ now?” he said finally.

Dean laughed, the cigarette dangling from his lip as he paged through the Bible. “That’s what you noticed? Not that I’m a priest now? Thought that would be more of a surprise.”

Sam’s eyes widened. “I thought—you must be dressed like that for a case.” The vocabulary of Sam’s former life returned slowly.

“Nope. It’s the real thing. Ordained and everything.”

Despite his years in a reality… not _this_ one, Sam had significant trouble absorbing this. He felt an odd joy that he could feel something as vivid as utter bewilderment. Finally he said, _“Why?”_

Dean straightened up and looked Sam in the eye. His gaze was uncommonly piercing, unflinching. Gone was the guilt and uncertainty Sam had come to expect in Dean’s eyes—it had been there so long, Sam couldn’t even have said when it started. Its absence silenced him. 

Dean found the spot he wanted in his Bible and marked it with his finger. “Because if you want a job done right,” he said, tossing his cigarette down and grinding it out with his foot, “you gotta do it yourself.”

He began chanting in Latin. Sam was startled by the power in his voice. Dean’s Latin was much, much better now—better than Sam’s had ever been. The words went into Sam’s heart, into his blood, flowed down his face in his tears, and suddenly he was on his knees. Dean stood over him, still speaking, and as his voice rose, he rested his hand on Sam’s head. There was a rush of wind. Dean stood firm, but Sam slumped to the ground. Dean’s hand followed him down, and on the last word, spoken into silence, patted his cheek gently.

“It’s over now,” Dean said. “You can open your eyes.”

Sam realized he had been cowering, eyes screwed tightly shut against a bright, bright light. He opened them cautiously.

The wind whistled over a blackened plain. The flames were gone. So was his fear. The only smoke Sam could see was a small curl wafting up from Dean’s discarded cigarette. Utter silence prevailed, broken by the cry of a bird.

“All set,” said Dean cheerfully. He helped Sam to his feet. He grinned at Sam’s bewilderment, then, finally, embraced him, thumping his back hard.

“It’s really good to see you,” he said.

Sam clung on, the world spinning under him. “You too,” he said.

* * *

Dean didn’t know how long it took him to crawl out of the bottle after Sam disappeared. Weeks—months, maybe. He knew Sam wasn’t in hell. That helped, but only a little.

Sometimes, when Dean looked around at the world they’d always lived in, he wondered if the world beyond, the world that Sam had fallen into through the crack in reality, was really so much worse than this one. Maybe it was better. Maybe in that world, loved ones didn’t always die. Maybe God really cared, there.

 _I care,_ said the voice in his mind, the one that had been trying to get his attention all these weeks.

 _Sure you do,_ Dean answered.

The voice kept prodding him, calling him out of his drunken stupor, but it never said anything useful. It never answered any of his questions. It never had. Why would he believe God cared?

Then again… he was alive, and so was Sam, somewhere. Even if they would never see each other again. Thus far in their lives, there had always been an answer. An escape plan. A way to stop the end of the world, even if the price was Sam leaving it. Everyone he had talked to—angels, demons, fairies, even witches—had told him there was no way back from where Sam had gone, and that to try to open one would unleash hell on earth.

Well, Dean thought. We’ve done it before. What’s one more time?

He stopped drinking, but he also stopped sleeping. He couldn’t sleep without Sam across the aisle between the beds. He still always got a hotel room with two beds, and every morning, it hurt to see the other one, empty and neatly made. Some habits you just couldn’t break.

As for the Bunker, he couldn’t see ever going back there. He wasn’t a legacy without Sam. There were no Men of Letters without him. The place—he could feel it sitting there, a hole in the middle of America, his past and his thwarted future, mocking him. It felt like a tomb.

He started visiting churches. He couldn’t have said why. They soothed him. He prayed because there was nothing else to do, and because Sam would have.

_Please, God. Let him be found. Let him come home._

There was one church he especially loved, a beautiful little Catholic chapel in a small town. After a few times seeing him there, one of the priests started talking to him. Dean was pretty hostile to him at first. He wondered when hostility had become his default. Father Cressman was a good man, and he sincerely wanted to fight evil. Who was to say his weapons—words of the Bible, a blessed rosary, and sincere prayer—were less effective than Dean’s beloved grenade launcher? 

The good father was a surprisingly young man—about Dean’s age or a little younger. He was short, thin, soft-spoken… and radiated a quiet power that Dean felt more vividly day by day, that drew Dean back to the little chapel when he knew Father Cressman would be there and no one else would.

Eventually, to his own puzzlement, he found himself telling the priest about his conversations with God. Harry, as he had quietly urged Dean to call him, was unfazed. He merely nodded, sitting next to Dean on the pew, holding his rosary in hands relaxed on his knees.

“So you do believe,” he said.

“That’s all you have to say? You’re not gonna call the men in white coats as soon as I leave? Because you know, in the wider world, what I’ve got going on is usually called schizophrenia.”

“You’re not schizophrenic.” He was as calm as ever, his direct, gray-eyed gaze full of certainty and compassion.

“You seem pretty sure of that. What if I told you I met him? When I did, he was just a… just a drunk, a failed writer disappearing into the bottle and weird phone sex lines. Writing about _me_. And… and my brother.”

“Sam,” said Harry easily. “You lost him, but not to death.”

Dean fought confusion, constantly-smoldering anger, and bewilderment at himself. He had told the priest too much. Had he endangered him? Somehow, it seemed the little man could never be in danger. He cursed himself for thinking that. How many times had he thought someone he cared about was safe, invulnerable?

How many times had he been proven wrong, in fire, blood, and unspeakable evil?

“Evil is all around us,” said Harry, as if he’d heard Dean’s thought. “We fight it every day. You, I think, more literally and vigilantly than nearly anyone, but we all wage our battle. We pray for forgiveness for our own evil, born within us, and for the safety of others, that they not be touched by evil.”

He was quiet for a moment. He did this often, stating something that might seem obvious, just a quote from the Bible as one might expect from a priest. Then he merely waited for Dean to react. Dean’s reaction was never obvious. Never anything anyone might call _normal._ He did not know why the priest thought Dean was worth his time—worth saving.

 _Maybe I could be saved._ Sam spoke clearly in his memory, voice trembling with tears, and it was his own voice.

“Of course you can, my son,” said Harry. How was it not weird to be called _son_ by a guy his own age who wanted him to call him Harry?

“Are you an angel?” Dean blurted. He had wanted to ask for some time, but he dreaded the answer. There were ways to find out, of course, but Dean hadn’t tried any of them. It seemed like… not playing fair.

Harry laughed out loud, the sound startled out of him. His laughter, rare as it was, was answer enough, but after it faded, he said, “Me? Ah, Dean. My son, there are angels all around us—”

“You have no idea,” Dean muttered.

“And maybe they speak to you through me. Because I sense a calling in you.”

“What do you mean? A calling to what?”

“To the church. To God. I believe he’s enlisting you. I have read between the lines of your careful stories, Dean. You believe. You have known demons, and vanquished them.”

Dean looked down, ashamed. _What about teaming up with them?_ he thought. And in the barest mental whisper, _What about becoming one?_

 _You are forgiven,_ said the voice.

“You believe in evil because you have seen it with your own eyes,” said the priest. “But have you not also seen miracles?”

* * *

It wasn’t their last conversation, but it was the one that turned the tide. Dean finally told Harry everything he could, sparing him the gory details about hunting and all that was real in their world, speaking in the language of religious metaphor. Sam was not in hell, he’d explained. Or purgatory. “I’ve been there,” Dean explained. Harry barely blinked. “That’s not where he went. And he’s not in heaven, and he’s not dead.”

“Other worlds,” Harry mused quietly as they shared a cigarette outside the church. It was Harry’s one sin, the one thing he had not given up, for which he did penance every day.

“Is it an actual sin, though?” Dean asked the first time they smoked together. “I mean, the Bible doesn’t say anything about smoking, does it?”

“It is an indulgence. A failure of self-denial.”

“Why don’t you tell me not to do it, then? Or not to drink?”

“Hypocrisy is a much greater sin.”

Other worlds existed, Harry explained. A God that could create this world was not constrained by bonds of time and space, by physics as humans understood them. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Sam could be as close as the air against Dean’s skin, or as far away as the sun, but Dean’s prayer could call him back from that other place.

“I’m afraid he’s… suffering there,” Dean confessed. “In danger in that other place.” In his dreams it was so. He saw Sam in a place of monsters and war, much like purgatory. Much like their own world.

He wondered if there were anything else.

“And so you ask God to protect him, because you can’t reach him to protect him yourself.”

Sometimes when Harry spoke, Dean got confused between his voice and God’s, inside his head.

_There’s a reason for that._

Suddenly, not reaching Sam was not OK. It never had been, but when Harry, or God, spoke about protecting him—well, that was Dean’s job, ever since he was four years old, and it was time he got back to it. He wasn’t going to leave it to God or anyone else.

He ground out the cigarette with his foot and stood up from the stoop behind the little chapel. “All right,” he said. “I’m going to seminary, I guess. Can you help me get in?”

* * *

It was a shock, he supposed. Dean Winchester, speaker of every blasphemy, ultimate non-believer, and sinner many times over, of all the sins. That he would take one step down this path, let alone follow it to its end, seemed like the ultimate paradox. Yet here he was. He’d asked Harry if he could get around the four-year degree he was supposed to have, if the church wouldn’t take one look at him and send him packing—excommunicate him, even though he wasn’t Catholic, and what about that not-Catholic part? Harry’s reply had always been that God would show him the way.

So it had proved, and here he was. Bible in hand, clad in newly-blessed vestments, packing holy water much as he always had, except this he had blessed himself… walking into the fire.

He had learned. He had called open the portal. He had an appointment. And if Sam lived through the crossing, he would drive out any evil that came with him. He would bring his brother back, as God wanted him to do.

God was real, and in his passive-aggressive, infuriating way, He did love His creations. Sam and Dean, perhaps, more than most. He’d had a lot to say once Dean really started listening. So when he stepped from the Impala toward the burning fields, Dean was infused with holy power—the same as that he’d felt in Father Cressman, a power he had been using to fight evil his whole life, now immeasurably greater simply by way of true belief. 

Like Sam had always told him, in his way. Maybe they could be saved.

* * *

He hadn’t known there would be fire when he opened the gate to the other place, but he wasn’t surprised, really. There was always fire.

It was a different Sam he brought out of it this time, thirty-some years after the first time. He was older. Maybe he was broken.

Dean knew he was good at the rescuing part. He wasn’t worried about that. The healing, putting back together—of that, he was much less sure. It would be a new challenge, one he would rise to. Because he knew now that he was not alone in it. It was not just he and Sam who wanted to stay together, not just brothers who wanted to survive together in this world. A higher power willed the same, and empowered Dean to make it so.

As he raised his Bible before him, speaking back the flames, walking toward Sam, he had felt him there with him. It wasn’t the God he knew, not really. It was a much greater God, the one who’d been with him since before he was born, the maker of worlds, creator of all that was good and right, and Dean had known, through every doubt and blasphemy, that He was real. Sam had never given up his belief. They’d been disappointed by angels who turned out to be, as Dean so prosaically put it, dicks. A God that hid in human form while the world crumbled around him… it had taken Dean some time to forgive that, to heed the voice that spoke first in his dreams, and later, all the time. He finally understood when he realized he would never understand. He had finally forgiven one face of God when he’d realized there were millions, infinite capacity for infinite love.

Such as that he had for his brother, that shielded them both from the flame.

He’d learn, one day, all that had happened to Sam in that other place. But for now, Sam was clean, blessed, free of any evil that had cleaved to him. When Sam stood up, strange, older, freed, and embraced him, Dean knew that together, they could win at last. They would rid the world of evil. And when they were finished, perhaps there were other worlds to fight in. Together. Always.

* * *

Sam was filled with the sensation of Dean being more his brother than ever, and nothing like the brother he’d known, and with being so much himself, but not the self he had been. Since Dean had blessed him, memories—of blood and fire, betrayal and strangeness and all the darkness of another place, and yes, light, too—were fading. Other memories were sharpening. This place. It was his home, and his cells remembered.

He settled against the familiar vinyl, tucking his legs slightly as he’d always had to, felt the rumble under his feet as Dean started the car. He took a long pull at the brown glass bottle, and his senses were flooded with the savory, sour-wheaty bite, cold in his inflamed throat. The road hummed as the Impala picked up speed. Black land behind them, golden fields ahead, and all of time.

“I guess you’re the older brother now,” Dean said.

Sam was peering in the side mirror at his gray-streaked hair. “I guess I am. Doesn’t feel much that way.”

“It’s a little weird to see you that way.”

“You’re one to talk. Do you… really believe now? It’s real, the priest thing?” Sam didn’t ask if Dean planned to live as an actual, ordained priest. Those explanations could come later. He didn’t know what he himself would do in this world, this new old world he’d come home to.

“I really do. I can’t explain it. But… I’ll try. I’ll tell you what I have in mind, for us. It’s about saving the world, as usual.”

Sam smiled. “I’m game.”

“Dinner first,” said Dean. “Can’t save the world on an empty stomach.”

“I don’t think mine has ever been emptier,” Sam said. He hadn’t thought of food in what felt like years. Had he even eaten in that other place? Had he needed to? Now his stomach was waking up, and memories of food flooded his brain and belly until the latter could be heard even over the strains of Metallica from the old tape deck.

“There’s a little diner in the town a few miles ahead,” Dean said. “Great burgers. They might have some salads and stuff, too.”

“A burger sounds fantastic,” said Sam.

Sitting in a booth, on seats of cracked blue vinyl with the stuffing showing, they didn’t talk about the years apart. Not about what had happened to them, anyway.

“You could get those years back,” Dean was saying as he dumped ketchup on his fries. “Hell, you could get turned into a teenager again. You never know in our line.”

“Or I could get turned into an old man instantly.”

Dean nodded. “Without any of these years in between.” He gestured at himself.

Sam was grinning thoughtfully. “Come to think of it, you _do_ have a lot more experience with this kind of thing than I do.”

“True. But the body swapping, that’s all you.”

They talked of their old times together, and whether they would head back to the Bunker, where Dean hadn’t been since they parted, or sleep in a hotel that night. Sam’s belly filled along with his heart. The waitress’s flirtatious smile, Dean’s laughter, and his own as he remembered how it was done… they blotted out the future and the past. It was now, and it was enough.

Later, they would save the world. Maybe more than once. Still later, they would leave it. But Dean’s new belief—one Sam could feel, emanating from him with the same certainty that drew Sam out of the flames, every time—that belief spoke of a reward, and rest, at the end of their road.

Sam felt it too, and he too believed again. Weariness fell from him as he thought of work and rest ahead, and he forgot he’d ever doubted.


End file.
